


And the Walls Kept Tumbling Down

by Helholden



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bittersweet Ending, Bonding, F/M, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-07
Updated: 2014-06-07
Packaged: 2018-02-03 19:50:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1755601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Helholden/pseuds/Helholden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anything to be around her, he did it. Even if it meant serving her brother, Robb Stark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And the Walls Kept Tumbling Down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jeynewaters (tumblr)](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=jeynewaters+%28tumblr%29).



> **Author's Notes:** For a tumblr prompt I should've filled _ages_ ago.

 * * *

 

Sandor had charged his way through mud and high waters, through rivers that ran red with blood. He had ridden through unforgiving storms that lashed out and flooded the lands, through dead villages full of heaps of ruined corpses from a ravaged and war-torn kingdom. Carrion crows ate out their eyes. Wolves tore at their rotting flesh, and dogs snarled in the background by the edges of trees.

 

He had ridden past the burning tents outside of the Crossing at the Green Fork on the Trident, halting Stranger long enough to stare at the flare of burning cloth in a torrent of rain and wind. Arya Stark, the younger she-wolf, had been sitting on the horse in front of him. Her more ladylike sister had been riding separately from them on her own horse, though she too had drawn her horse to a stop with them to stare at the wreckage left behind because of the war.

 

It hadn't been just any camp, though. Those burning tents had been a part of their brother’s camp, the young wolf, Robb Stark.

 

Sandor had witnessed a rising of men about the Twins, men who fought back as Robb Stark rode out on his horse and cut Frey’s men down as they came at him. The boy king was not alone either. Behind Robb Stark, a charge of men on horses had followed in his wake, imitating his wrath, swords swinging and singing into the dusk with an ancient song of steel.

 

Sandor had watched as the iron expression upon Lady Catelyn’s face melted into an anguished cry. He had watched in silence as she ran towards both of her girls and they ran towards her in equal strides. Lady Catelyn fell upon her knees with a cry, and she clutched them both to her breast as if they were corpses to cry over and not daughters to welcome back home.

 

His journey had led him here to kneel before King Robb, the boy known as the King in the North who wore his bronze crown with hammered iron spikes as if the Old Gods themselves had placed it upon his head in reverence.

 

Sandor bowed his head in submission.

 

 _Even a dog gets tired of being kicked_ , he remembered as he kneeled there, his head bowed for the boy king.

 

“Rise,” King Robb said, “Sandor Clegane.”

 

Sandor pushed himself to his feet. He lifted his chin to meet the boy king’s gaze. King Robb had his mother’s Tully coloring, but he had ice in his eyes just like his father, the late Lord Eddard Stark.

 

“You have returned my dear sisters to me, Sandor Clegane,” Robb said, “despite being the king’s dog. I would question your loyalties, but you risked your life to save theirs. For whatever reasons of your own, you chose to help them.” In one smooth motion with his hand, King Robb gestured across everything in front of himself. “Whatever you want, Clegane, I will grant it.”

 

A silence had fallen over the court. They were out in the open in a dark field with torches burning all around them, lighting up the night sky with an orange glow.

 

“I wish to serve you,” Sandor heard himself say, though his voice sounded miles away from his own body.

 

He knew what he was saying, but still it was hard to say.

 

King Robb stared at him, narrowing his icy gaze, and remained quiet for some time. Eventually, Robb announced, “So be it. You are part of our company now.”

 

They rode to Winterfell to reclaim it, and they redoubled their men. Sandor kept himself busy, but no matter what he did he found himself staring at the little bird often. She looked back sometimes, but it was only timidly and with fear, and he would quickly look away, scowling as if to hide that he had been watching her.

 

He was not enamored with her. No, the little bird was too young for the likes of his imagination, but there was a reason he kept watching her. He knew he found himself in her company often, though he couldn’t say why. They did not talk much. They did not know each other well, and Sandor was amongst her family now. He could not speak to her openly the way he did in King’s Landing, and so he held his bitter tongue.

 

But anything to be around her, he did it.

 

He took care of her horse, and when she got a pup, he helped her with feeding it and training it. Lady Sansa did not know how to train a dog, and so Sandor had to show her the right way to handle them. He taught her the tricks, told her how to earn their respect and their loyalty. Eventually, Sansa learned to laugh around him. She still had trouble meeting his face for a time, but she smiled more often. Soon enough, even looking at him was not very hard for her.

 

Sandor found himself staring at her far too often. His fixation was rooted deep, and he couldn’t eradicate it. He had bowed for her brother just to be around her. Another dog, nobody special here either, but he couldn’t let her go.

 

He couldn’t get her out of his head.

 

Sandor did not entertain the idea of Lady Sansa as a viable option for wedding or bedding. He did not dream of her at night unless it was a childlike dream. There were times when he closed his eyes at night and saw himself in a field. In the distance he would see Sansa as well, blurry but visible on the cusp of his vision. She was picking flowers or playing with dogs, laughing, smiling. He watched her. He made sure she was safe, and that was it.

 

They were nonsense, those dreams. Ridiculous things he’d wake up from, angry and unable to explain why, and dive right into a bottle of wine to try and forget them. Unbeknownst to her, Lady Sansa reminded him of his past, of what he was once like, an innocent boy with a dream of the world before him. Maybe that was why it made him so angry. He hated being reminded of his past, even though his face reminded him of it everyday.

 

This was worse.

 

It was worse because the dreams made him happy. They made him happy, and then he woke up, and he wasn’t happy anymore.

 

Sandor began to avoid her to avoid the dreams of her, to avoid his past, and then the war took them away from Winterfell again. He rode south with an army at the behest of King Robb. They returned almost two years later, victorious from each battle they fought on mud, snow, sleet, and rock, and Sandor came back to find Lady Sansa had grown further in his absence. She was taller now, fuller too, and shaped more like a woman. Her hair was longer, and her face was leaner, the roundness of her youth leaving her at last.

 

Lady Sansa came to him willingly now with a smile on her face to ask him of his journeys and his battles. Annoyed at first, he found himself slowly giving in. She was not scared of him now, and his sour demeanor did not turn her away. By now, he feared she knew him. Maybe not in the same way she knew her damnable she-wolf of a sister, but she knew his patterns and she knew his behavior. Sansa no longer flinched at his foul language or rough tone.

 

Sandor began to talk to her, to tell her of his own stories as he once did in King’s Landing, and sometimes he scoffed at her, and sometimes he didn’t. Sansa looked hurt by his behavior towards her, and at other times, she grew indignant of his treatment. On one day in particular, Sandor made a rude comment that he forgot as soon as he had said it, but it was enough to upset Sansa beyond her usual ability to overlook his cruel words.

 

Today, it was not happening.

 

She withdrew from the bench suddenly, rising to her feet. She was bolder now, stiffer in her posture when she was upset and unafraid to let it show now that she was in safe company. Safer company than King’s Landing had been, anyway.

 

“I remember a time when you were kind to me, Lord Clegane,” Sansa announced formally, her tone laced with agitation. “Before you left for war again with my brother, you were kind, then. Tell me, what has changed?”

 

Sandor snorted, snatching a bottle of wine off the table and tearing the cork out with his teeth. “Seven _hells_ ,” he snapped. “How many times do I have to bloody tell you not to call me ‘lord,’ girl?”

 

He gulped down the wine, spilling it over his one good cheek as well as the one that was ruined.

 

Sansa was quiet at first, but he could feel her fuming. “When you stop calling me ‘ _girl_ ,’” she snapped right back, and then she tore off into the evening and vanished from his sight.

 

Sandor drowned himself in the bottle and woke up in the kennels the next morning.

 

He felt awful, but he wouldn’t admit it, and the hole grew deeper and wider and tore at him until he tore at other people and became a vicious wreck from day to day. One day, he sat down near her and opened his mouth to speak as if nothing had happened at all, and Sansa rose from her seat as polite as could be, just like her proper lady mother taught her, and excused herself from his presence.

 

He was slack-jawed and amazed that the little bird was holding a grudge.

 

Sandor refused to be the first to break. It took Sansa time to cool down, and one day she sat down beside him again, though she said nothing to him.

 

Sandor started the conversation first, and Sansa responded, and she did not get up and walk away.

 

They pretended as if their brawl of words had never even happened. Sansa did not bring it up again, perhaps well aware that Sandor would not apologize out loud to her. But the silence was his apology, and she knew it.

 

They fell back into their old patterns again. Amusingly, sometimes they bickered back and forth. Sansa was no longer a shy and intimidated little thing, but a bold woman coming into her own. He watched her grow up, and King Robb assigned Sandor to be her guard when he noticed they had become friendly but not too friendly. “I think it will be good for her,” Robb said, “to at least have a guard whom she carries on well with.”

 

It was like King’s Landing again. Only it wasn’t.

 

When Sandor came to Lady Sansa’s chambers on the eve of her wedding to some poncy little lordling, he knocked three times and was answered with, “Come in!”

 

He came in and found her standing before her mirror, staring at her reflection in its clear glass. She was not wearing her gown, but a simple dress made of grey, and her hair was down. Though she ought to have looked happy, she looked downright miserable.

 

“Your brother wishes to speak with you about the wedding,” he said gruffly.

 

Sansa seemed as though she barely heard him.

 

She was silent for a long time as well, staring at her dress and rolling the material of her sleeves between her fingers as she glanced down at it. “I don’t know that I want to get married,” she admitted suddenly, the admission shocking him. This was a personal matter, a woman’s matter, and certainly none of his business.

 

“I will fetch your mother, then,” he rasped, turning away to get her.

 

“No,” Sansa called out, looking away from her mirror at last. “I . . . I do not wish to speak with her. Please, Sandor, do not get her.”

 

Sandor paused, but when he faced her again, he was scowling. “You don’t want to speak to me about this, so who might I fetch?”

 

“No one, please,” she answered in a soft voice. “I don’t have anyone I want to speak to.” Lowering her chin, Sansa walked over to the cushioned bench beside her bed and sat down. Her silence worried him, and it made him uncomfortable as well, but he could not leave her there alone.

 

Awkwardly, in his clinking armor, Sandor crossed the room and sat down beside her on the bench. As they did most times, when they talked to one another.

 

“You look like someone poisoned the wine at your wedding announcement,” he said. “What has you like this?”

 

Sansa’s hands were in her lap. “I do not wish to marry him,” Sansa admitted. “I don’t love him. I don’t even know him.”

 

“Marriage isn’t about that,” Sandor reminded her. “It’s about kingly little shits and duty, you know that.”

 

“It should be about that,” Sansa said.

 

“Maybe one day when we’re all dead and buried, it will be,” he replied. “But not today. And not tomorrow.”

 

“ . . . And not next week,” Sansa added sadly.

 

Sandor felt wretched. She didn’t want to marry the little bugger, but he couldn’t stop it. “No,” he rasped. “Not next week.”

 

Much to his shock, Sansa’s hand reached out for his. She laid it atop his knuckles, which were calloused and dirty, and curled her fingers beneath his palm.

 

“I should like a husband who talks to me as you do,” she said.

 

“If the bloody little bugger talked to you the way I do, I’d gut him myself.”

 

She laughed, a soft and quiet sound of slight joy despite her despondent state. “Do you promise?” she teased.

 

“ _Yes_ ,” Sandor replied a little too quickly, a hotheaded tone to his voice.

 

“Good,” Sansa said with a small smile on her face. She glanced over at him, her eyes glowing. “I may yet survive my marriage a widow, free to marry whomever I chose after I marry Robb’s choice first.”

 

“Fat chance of that,” he scoffed.

 

“You underestimate him,” Sansa murmured kindly, taking her hand away from his. Where her hand had touched him, it was hot as if her fingers had burned a hole straight through him. Not truly, and not really, but it felt like the type of fire he might not be so afraid of after all.

 

She married the fool, and then he died some years later, and Sandor still watched over her as always. Ever faithful, he stood by her side. There came a kiss one day, borne of the same fire he had once felt through the touch of her hand, but there never came a marriage. Sansa was married to another, a second choice of Robb’s, and yet Sandor still watched over her. As always. He watched her in the bright sunlight of the fields as she played with her children. Children not his.

 

He watched Lady Sansa as she picked flowers with her daughters, remembering a dream he had once had of a little bird picking her own flowers and laughing as the wind blew in her hair.

 

Sandor held onto those dreams, even to his dying day, even as the very world was crumbling down all around him at the edge of his vision.

 

He had charged his way through mud and high waters, through rivers that had run red with blood. He had raced through storms that lashed against the land, through dead villages full of heaps of ruined corpses. He had ridden through as the carrion crows plucked out their eyes, wolves tore at their rotting flesh, and dogs snarled in the distance, awaiting their chance at the feast.

 

He had experienced the very essence of the seven hells on earth.

 

And yet as his vision faded from him, the only thing Sandor remembered was a little bird’s humming voice and her soft laughter echoing behind it . . .

 

. . . And a blissful field of flowers to welcome him home.

 

 


End file.
